Review on Lenovo G50-30

It looks like Lenovo enjoys to keep its fans on their toes.  We have seen that Lenovo has been successful at offering its customers with quite a variety of countless laptop models with varying prices and functioning. No doubt, this effort of Lenovo is to be appreciated. The latest models introduced by Lenovo comes from its G-series, known for their agility, comfort, features and design. Meet yet another machine brought to you by Lenovo, G50-30. The highlights of this laptop we heard includes it low-price and remarkable performance. We would like to review it to comprehend if this is the truth or it is based on mere rumors.   

Display and Design

The Lenovo G-series comes up with pretty much similar specs. Talking about the display, the G50-30 is well-found with a 15.6-inch screen exhibiting a resolution of 1366x768 pixels with a brightness of 216.1 cd/m². This is much appropriate as it features relatively a lower price. However, if we talk about the contrast, it appears extremely disappointing (using the most lenient words). The contrast ratio of 161:1 and black level of 1.4 cd/m² is not even expected by lowest budget laptops. The other notebooks, the potential rivals such as Packard Bell’s EasyNote offers much better than this in approximately the same price. Moreover, the screen unveils extreme bluish shades which kills the picture beauty even more. The low-budget laptops we have reviewed so far do normally come with low-resolution screen but with lesser complaints.

This cheap built laptop doesn’t own a remarkable design as predictable but it is durable in nature. Weighing 2.1 kg, it is normal portable and added attraction is it comes fan-less enabling it to remain calm and less noisy. 

Performance

Lenovo is serious on providing its customers with full on packed performance but how sincerely they have come along? Coming in low price, Lenovo G50-30 is installed with basic features convenient for office usage. Powered by Intel Celeron N2830 dual-core processor (Bay Trail), it manages to deliver an acceptable performance for performing normal tasks. However, if you demand more form this machine, I am afraid it wouldn’t be able to satisfy you. 

The overall system performance was found smooth but became quite slow when multiple number of windows were opened. Not surprisingly, the PCMark revealed low scores which was again expected with the installed processor.  

Speaking of the graphics, the HD Graphics core ropes DirectX 11 and clocks with speeds of up to 750 MHz which is incompetent to the much powerful AMD namely Radeon R3 and Radeon R4. Hence, we are still unable spot anything extraordinary in the Lenovo G50-30’s performance track. 

Gaming Performance

Gaming might be one of your goals when buying a laptop. Sadly, this laptop is not created for the purpose. It fails to support the latest 3D games and only few games accomplished to work with smooth frame rates but delivering with low resolution. Consequently, we would not recommend to people who are searching for cheap laptops for gaming. This is certainly not the one to get hands on for gaming.

Battery Runtime

Well, finally we have come up with a good news regarding this laptop. Usually the laptops coming in low prices exhibit shorter battery life but Lenovo took good care of this and managed to deliver the user with longer battery life, keeping the machine alive for approximately 5 hours and 11 minutes. This is confidently a good rate but if we talk about one of its rivals such as Packard Bell’s EasyNote, it remains juiced up for 7 hours and 9 minutes. 

Networking and Connectivity 

The Lenovo G50-30 features wide range of connectivity and networking options. It comes with 2 USB 2.0 poerts and 1 USB 3.0 port. You will also find 1 VGA and the essential HDMI. Additionally, the fast Ethernet (10/100MBit), Realtek RTL8723BE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC (b/g/n), Bluetooth 4.0 offers you with great networking options you wish for from a small budget laptop.

Verdict

We have discovered the low-budget Lenovo G50-30 quite suitable for that class of people who desire to own a laptop to carry out their basic computing tasks such as browsing, emailing, skype and videos. Being fanless, this laptop doesn’t make much noise and operates decently if not burdened much. The laptop was found long lived, all thanks to its powerful battery. But Lenovo G50-30 is not all good, it comes with few major short-comings. The display wasn’t found acceptable, even the excuse of being low-budget laptop could not save it. Surprisingly, while other laptops come with normally a 2 year warranty, Lenovo G50-30 comes only with a 12 month warranty.

The Amazing Life of the Year 2050

So, how many of you walk on the paths of future in your mind? Ever gave a thought that how life would be after 50 years, after whole 5 decades? The moment I started thinking about it, my mind got filled with great excitement as it’s always fun to imagine the future. It takes you to the places where no one else can.

We have seen technology growing, leaving us startled by the fabulous inventions, unveiling difficult truths and discoveries. Undoubtedly, we cannot deny the fact that technology plays a pivotal role in directing our lives, both personal and professional. The question is how it will change our in future?

Starting with the favorite part of my imagination, ‘Spaceships!’ Yes, that’s right, the future of transportation. Right now we are on the verge of launching driver-less cars but still this doesn’t excite me to the highest levels. Growing up watching cartoons like The Jestons, Instopia and stuff like that, I have always been a fan of spaceships. Talking about the real world, flying cars would be a more appropriate term. How amusing it would be to travel in flying cars, no more street bumps, lesser traffic jams and most of all enjoying the journey in a most refreshing way. Who knows we might be enjoying the formula 1 race in air rather than on streets.

Next comes ‘The robots’. We are already experiencing robot inventions who are ready to play a human like role in our daily lives such as the latest Budgee, the robot who follows. So, we might see more of robots as our future buddies going out with us, carrying things for us, driving a car or even talking to us.

What about phones and laptops? We have seen our daily life gadgets shrinking day by day, going sleek and slimmer and highly portable. Following that, we may find our phones, laptops and tablets more of wearable devices. We might be wearing them as a good piece of jewelry or like a smart watch and controlling our normal computing tasks. Thinking of it also brings the term ‘Mental Telepathy’ in my mind, technology enabling people to communicate with each other through our minds exclusively while sitting at some other place.

Going deeper I see food transformations, yes I take food seriously and I am sure many people fall for food the same as me. It is predicted that the world population will grow tremendously. To counter that, various farming techniques would be applied most probably. By near 2035 or more surely by 2050, meat might grow in labs or salads in skyscrapers. Food predictions are hard to make, we cannot really forecast that which food would be the most popular from 50 years now. We might be finding instant food options more abundant than the actual food we eat right now.

A hamburger might pop up by just spilling warm water on some powder or perhaps a three course meal appear right before your eyes in seconds. The taglines of various food advertisements will be too funny, ‘two-minute steak’ instead of two-minute noodles we cook now. 

  

What would be the future of social networking? Surely it will no longer be a matter of tapping or clicking on screens anymore. People would have real time conversations. E-commerce has already changed much of our shopping routine, we might be shopping with our friends online, virtually trying clothes and accessories and selecting the desired particulars.

Wandering through the wildest part of my imagination, I forecast super heroes with veiled faces such as Superman, Batman, and Spider-man saving us from any mishaps and accidents.  Well, I can’t say if they will be exactly the same but surely an improved version of policemen and soldiers, more powerful, well-informed of the surroundings and much faster in saving lives.

For the love of animals, how can I miss predicting them by 2050? Only animal lovers would understand that how much they wish to understand their pets. We keep cats, dogs, hamsters etc but sometimes fail to understand our lovely fur balls. We love to take care of them, play with them and share real lifetime memories. What if we could converse with them and understand their language? 2050 might come up with such surprises enabling the pet owner to talk with their pets or at least recognizing their sound language. Well, it might possibly bring few problems such as discovering that the pet who you thought loves you the most may actually carry utmost disgust for you! 

2050 is surely going to be full of amazement. It might be way more advance of what we are thinking right now or might be really devastating bringing wars involving hi-tech highly destructible weapons. Till then, let’s wait for 2050 to enjoy the imagination turned into reality.

HP EliteBook Folio 1040 Review

Searching for a laptop that can satisfy your business needs, has great portability and high security, HP EliteBook Folio 1040 wins at maintaining such impression. Its razor sharp aluminum built and speedy Core i7 performance is definitely a charm. Well, this was just a starter. Here is an overall review of EliteBook Folio which would unquestionably make it even more desirable from your end.   

Display

The display is amazing, Folio 1040sports a vivid 1920 x 1080-pixel display. This is equal to what Dell 7440 and Acer P645 but in comparison to Lenovo X1's 2560 x 1440p screen, it doesn’t produce sharper images than what Lenovo offers. The HD screen delivers detailed bright images with the essential crisp. The text also appears to be clear and easy to read.     

Design

The HP Elite Book Folio has a well-defined stylish design. The lid is made of dark-gray aluminum with gentle curves on the edge. The large chrome HP logo is placed in the center. It has been designed elegantly yet gracefully powerful. The inside look exhibits the presence of same dark-gray aluminum with an air vent/speaker grille which lengths upto the deck of black keyboard. The large touch pad is present below with a finger print reader present at the right side.

The EliteBook weighs upto 3.4 pounds. In competition to that, The Lenovo ThinkPAd Carbon X1 is lighter weighing around 3.15 pounds. But Elite Book is lighter than Acer TravelMate and Dell Latitude.

Durability and Security

How about we question the durability of EliteBook? Well, it has been found tough enough to stand against rash drops, vibrations and dust as it successfully passed the 12 MIL-STD 810G  tests.   

Moreover, this robust machine is not only strong outside but inside as well. HP EliteBook Folio features the HP Sure start which provides with the self-healing properties against BIOS attacks, which can badly damage your computer’s firmware. Sure Start facilitates you with finding out exactly when it defends the elitebook form any attack through an audit log system.

HP also introduces the HP Trust Circles. This will provide protection and security to all of your important files and data. You can keep the documents in an encrypted folder that can only be accessed by specific users you have opted for.

Even if these options doesn’t satisfy your security concerns, say hello to the Finger Print Reader. Through this, you can register two to ten of your digits for safe logins as well as fingerprint to unlock the EliteBook. The fingerprint reader is found responsive in the test and a pretty good option to improve the security of your data.     

Touchpad

You’ll be happy to discover that EliteBook Folio is the first ever notebook to use Synaptics’ ForcePad. This doesn’t support any physical buttons and clicking in favor of a fully pressure-sensitive touchpad. The touchpad is found sensitive, responsive to common multifinger gestures. You are also given an option of customizing the Force Pad settings allowing you to toggle functions such as finger rotates to flick to slide through images. The overall Touchpad experience has been made friendly with easy to adaptability.

Webcam

The ElitBook Folio’s 720p webcam produces fairly good results. It has been well complemented by the CyberLink YouCam app for snapping photos and videos. The software enables you to edit your images with digital paintbrush strokes. You can also make videos at anywhere from 640 x 480p to 1280 x 720p. However, the smaller details of the images and videos appear bit blur but overall it fulfils its purpose.      

Performance

The out class performance of EliteBook is what makes its rival machines envious of it. It manages to score strong numbers, the 1.7-GHz Intel Core i7-4650U processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD are found in the Folio 1040.

The HP also beat out or match its rivals, all of which had SSDs and at least 4GB of RAM. The Lenovo X1 Carbon scored 4,734, the Acer P645 (Intel Core i7-4500U) achieved 4,886 and the Dell 7440 (1.9-GHz Intel Core i5-4300U ) scored 4,544.

Moreover, the Folio 1040 booted Windows 7 Professional in only 15 seconds and replicated 5GB multimedia files in just 37 seconds! These were some wow results generated by Folio.

Folio also won over the spreadsheet test. The task of pairing 20,000 names and addresses in Open Office, was completed in just 4 minutes and 14 seconds which was a minute fatser than the Lenovo X1. The Acer and Dell were also left behind in these numbers, both of them were about half a minute late than HP’s system.  

Verdict

Packing powerful performance along with the robust design, the HP EliteBook Folio 1040 accomplishes to fall in the category of one of the most impressive business notebooks in record. It showed marvelous performance in certain tests carried out leaving behind its top contenders.

But ofcourse not everything about it appears lovable. The bottom of the Folio may get warm and its audio is just fine, not as great as other laptops offer. But, the drawbacks are not so significant than what overall HP EliteBook Folio 1040 offers. With its attractive design and top-nothch security tools, Elitebook Folio might become your favorite one.

Nexus 9 vs Lenovo MIIX 3: A Comparison

What is the best tablet Nexus 9 or Lenovo MIIX 3? No one can answer this question as both have their own fans. As Lenovo is the award winning tablet but Nexus is also getting good feedback from markets. You cannot put tablets on the scale of Laptops and PCs. Though all of them are the products of technology but they all differ in their nature of usage. With advancements in technology and tough competition among manufacturers, buyers get confused in which one to buy.

Size and Style

Both of these tablets feature their own style. Where Nexus 9 have metallic frame around its edges, Lenovo MIIX 3 is all plastic but stiff enough when in use. The back of the Nexus is rubberized that is found catching greasy fingerprints and hard to get them removed. The matte-black surface of Lenovo feels velvety and non-slippery. Though catch light fingerprints but can easily be erased. Both of these tablets are easy to grip and light in weight. Nexus weighs 425g lighter than 582g MIIX. Weight of MIIX is justified by it’s display of 10.1 inches whereas Nexus offers 8.9 inches of display. Tablets are travel companion and they are prone to weigh light and easy to carry in bags. Our both devices are easy to carry around though MIIX needs to be packaged between forces in bag while transporting.

Processor Type

Seems like Nexus 9 is faster and advance this time with Dual-Core installed in it whereas MIIX have Intel Atom in it. Difference is made with the speed both these processors provide. With the processor speed of 2.3GHz in Nexus Lenovo is far away with the processor speed of 1.33 GHz. More speed comes with more graphics processing and more productivity in lesser time.

Operating System

Both of these tablets have 2 GB of RAM but differ in operating systems. MIIX supports Windows 8.1 with Bing whereas Nexus have Google’s latest operating system, Android 5.0 with Lollipop. Both Windows and Android have their own fans and preferred according to the requirements of the user.

Audio

Tablets are more into entertainment business. Another point that is kept in consideration by tablet buyers is the sound quality. A mono speaker is installed in MIIX 3 that gives out thin sound that comes from one side of the device. Connecting external speakers or headphones is recommended for movies. Nexus have BoomSound speakers installed that produces clear and vibrant sound. Unlike other tablets, it’s speakers does not face bottom or back of the tablet.

Input Devices

You can couple mouse and keyboard with MIIX 3 whereas Nexus offers the same feature in magnetic keyboard attachment that is connected wirelessly through Bluetooth and NFC to pair it up. The chiclet keyboard of Lenovo comes with the package whereas you need to buy Nexus keyboard separately.

Better Connectivity

Because of slim structure and light in weight tablets does not offer much connectivity options but you will be accommodated with all necessary connections. Other than wireless connections; Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and NFC, there are other necessary USB ports and microphone jacks in both of these devices.

Other Features

You cannot call Nexus affordable. This time as google have made it advance and better than previous versions that have also become little bit out of budget. Lenovo is still in your budget and inexpensive. Nexus will stay active for 9 hours and 30 minutes while MIIX 3 will stay with you only for 6 hours.

Features of both of the tablets have explained enough to get you out of the confusion of which tablet you should buy next.

Commbank’s Smartwatch App, One Step Ahead

After experiencing many variations smartphones and smart apps, pull your socks up to get amused by Commbank’s Smart Watch app. Banks like Westpac and St. George have been planning to make a smart watch app with their respective account balance apps, Cash Tank and Money Meter but the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is going far ahead than these banks in creating such kind of Smartwatch App.

It has been found that CBA are working on the most detailed and all inclusive banking app for smart watches in Australia. Available free on iOS, the Commbank App lets the users view their portfolio and watch lists. It even lets the user to get live share prices. This watch will cater to all the CBA customers for checking balance, will help you locate the nearest ATM cash withdrawal. If security concerns are boggling your mind, then worry not, this smart watch app has got it all covered. It comes with a 100% Security Guarantee as your smartphone commbank app.

Paul Rayson, executive general manager of CommSec, said in a statement around 25% of logins and 11% of trades now take place on the bank's mobile app, so making a smart watch app for trading is a natural fit for the bank's customers. The Commonwealth Bank also announced its consumer-focused CommBank app for smart watches is available to the public, after testing and development began in April.

As told earlier, this app available free on Android and iOS has somewhat similar features form the bank’s online Hub including the viewing of ATM locations as well as account balances. The app has offers so much more to its apple customers. Iphone users can access the CommBank app via Apple’s touch ID: with just a touch of a finger print, apple users will be able to transfer cash.

The CommBank app for smart watches, available free on Android and iOS, has some features from the bank's online hub — including viewing ATM locations and account balances.

The bank is also allowing iPhone users to access the CommBank app via Apple's Touch ID, meaning customers will be able to transfer cash and lock down credit cards after just a touch of their fingerprint. . If security concerns are boggling your mind, then worry not, this smart watch app has got it all covered. It comes with a 100% Security Guarantee as your smartphone commbank app.

Well, for all those who are not the customers of commbank need not to worry as you wouldn’t remain deprived of such app for long. The other banks are working on it too but hasn’t come up in such officially strong way. And due to so much competition, banks will of course answer this new app being introduced.